Re: Just say NYET to kneejerking

[Adam Shostack <adam@bwh.harvard.edu>]

Jim Dixon:

| The Internet is a wild and exciting place.  You want your children to
| get to know it.  But you would also like a way to build little fences
| between them and some things that they are just too young to deal with.
| How do you do it?

	Find a group of like minded parents.  Join resources together,
and hire someone to write code to do digital reputations & ratings
systems.  Encourage people to 'rate' their postings as G, PG, PG-13, R
or XXX.  (This is the American 'voluntary' movie rating system to
indicate the content of the movies.)

	Then hack up a newsreader/web browser to only connect to those
systems with a reputation behind them and also advertised as whatever
level of violence/sexuality/religiousity/communism that you define as
acceptable for your kids.

	This requires no law, no coersion.  All the tough thinking
work has been done, in terms of creting digital reputations schemes.
Now, all that needs to be done is implementation.  If you do it well,
and create a scheme that allows for multiple webs of trust, multiple
user defined ratings systems, etc, then coincidentally, you will have
created an infrastructure that allows for all sorts of smart
filtering.


Adam

-- 
Adam Shostack 				       adam@bwh.harvard.edu

Politics.  From the greek "poly," meaning many, and ticks, a small,
annoying bloodsucker.